'UnAustralian Painting in 1970', co-authored by Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson

Presented by Rex Butler

 

The year 1970 was an important turning point in Australian art. Bernard Smith in the second, updated edition of Australian Painting moved on from the unacknowledged ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ that concluded the 1962 edition and admitted in the three new chapters he added that Australian art was now abstract and international. At the same time, however, Ian Burn and Terry Smith in effect repeat the gesture of ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ in defending or lamenting the “provincialism” of Australian art. The truth is that Australian art had never been simply provincial – even the idea was possible only during the period of self-conscious artistic modernism, which runs from about 1920 until 1960, which is not coincidentally the period during which the dominant histories of Australian art are written. We might say that the idea of an “Australian” art is at once modernist and provincialist. But it is from the 1970s on that another vision of Australian art becomes clear, as it did for Bernard Smith: non-national, international, not medium-specific, not any longer a history of “Australian Painting”.

 

In this paper, we will look at the emerging “UnAustralian” tendencies of the 1970s and at the “UnAustralian” histories that start to be written during this period.

 

Rex Butler is Professor of Art History at Monash University. He is currently working on a history of UnAustralian art with ADS Donaldson and has recently completed a book on Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?